Slaying the Tyrant: How the Topos of the Tyrant Was Used to Defend Democracy

Dr. Ivana Stradner, who grew up in Serbia, discusses the rise of Serbian nationalism, Putin's strategy of increasing ethnic tensions in the region, and why we may be close to a new war in the Balkans.  

Perelman made a category of arguments that he termed "quasi-logical." Quasi does not mean "fake" in this context, but just that they are similar to the arguments made in formal logic. Dr. Steven B. Katz joins us to discuss each of the arguments within this category, and how they rely on some of the most basic cognitive patterns that humans use to make sense of the world around us. Because we can perceive similarity, difference, and the relations of parts to the whole, we are able to use these as basis for arguments to move others. This episode builds on the episode "Chaim Perelman's Theory of Argumentation." 

In just a few years, India has been transformed from a vibrant liberal democracy to a majoritarian autocracy under Narendra Modi. Under his Hindu majority rule, Muslims and Christians are subjected to extrajudicial killings and mosques and churches are burnt to the ground. Dr. Ashok Swain, a Hindu and Professor of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University, joins Dr. Isaksen and Noor Jahan Khan, who has a Master's degree in Mass Communication from Bangalore University and grew up as a Muslim in India, to talk about how this change came about and what can be done to save Indian democracy.

"A speech writer in Norway is supposed to be invisible." Kristine Dahl was working as a lawyer for the Norwegian government when she was asked to help write a speech for a government minister, and that's when she discovered a passion and talent for speech writing. Since then, she has written speeches for many ministers and business leaders, and she shares how she approaches a new assignment, tricks of the trade, the democratic function of her profession, and the current state of eloquence and speech writing in Norway.

Cherise Bacalski, an appellate attorney who makes oral arguments at the Utah Supreme Court and Utah Court of Appeals, also took a master's degree with an emphasis in rhetoric. She shares how her education in rhetoric helped her to become a better advocate and the role of ethos and identification in legal argumentation. 

Properly understood, the classical image of the tyrant is not a form of government, but rather a disease of the mind. In this episode, Dr. Isaksen revisits a text he wrote in April 2016 describing the classical symptoms of a tyrant and how Trump already then displayed every one of them. It is a modern version of the classical rhetorical exercise "the topos of the tyrant." For more details about the rhetorical exercise, listen to the podcast episode on the topos of the tyrant https://rhetorical-leadership.transistor.fm/4  
The original text performed in this podcast is available at http://intelligenceofpersuasion.blogspot.com/2016/04/why-trump-is-tyrant.html

00:00 Trump at CPAC 2023
00:57 Revisiting 2016 predictions
01:27 How freedom died in antiquity
02:57 Those who tried to save it
04:32 The Trumpian peril
05:42 Trump is a classical tyrant
07:16 What Trump could/would do as president
10:22 The vices of the tyrant
11:06 Suspicion
13:02 Arrogance
15:06 Cruelty and savagery
17:00 Immorality and avarice
19:34 Resist tyranny
19:51 Our democratic complacency
21:17 The weakness of our institutions

When Dr. Azamat Junisbai grew up in Qazaqstan, he looked down on those who spoke Russian with an accent. Although he was an ethnic Qazaq born in Qazaqstan, he had absorbed the colonial mindset that Russian language and culture were superior to the Qazaq language and culture. With Russia's attack on Ukraine, many in Qazaqstan are coming to a reckoning with Russian imperialism and its legacy in Eurasia. As a Qazaq sociologist, Dr. Junisbai shares his unique insights into this ideology and the hold it still has on many Russians.

00:00 Introducing Dr. Azamat Junisbai
00:24 Russia's image of its empire
02:16 Growing up in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic
04:22 The end of the Soviet Union
07:55 The diminished status of the Qazaq language
09:30 "How broken and colonized was my mind and language?"
11:00 The Asharshylyk (genocide by hunger)
12:50 Why the Qazaq Genocide is not more widely acknowledged
16:50 Russia as the colonial master
17:50 The endurance of the Empire/Soviet Union in the minds of Russians
19:20 How Russia's attack on Ukraine has accelerated decolonization
23:50 Why Russian imperialists see a weakened Russia as "the end of Russia"
26:50 This is Russia's war, not just Putin's war
29:00 The Leader and the People in Russian Imperialism
32:30 The loss of the Empire
34:12 How the Empire is taught and how it may be unlearned
37:00 The coming reckoning with Russia's imperialism and colonial history
38:30 How the colonial people are dehumanized
40:15 Human life has little value in Russian imperialism
42:30 It is the natural state of an empire to be at war
43:00 "Borders must be drawn with blood"
45:00 Controlling land is seen as the greatest value
46:25 How Putin uses "the Empire" to stay in power
47:34 The contest between the TV and the refrigerator
48:12 Trapped behind the Iron Curtain and within the grasp of the Kremlin
50:24 Russian defeat could mean another Berlin Wall coming down
51:00 Growing post-colonial solidarity between Ukraine and Qazaqstan
52:10 The future of Qazaqstan

Dr. Björn Olsen is a Professor of Infection Medicine at the Department of Medical Sciences, Uppsala University in Sweden. He was an active participant in the public policy debate where Sweden chose to disregard the advice and recommendations of the global scientific community and pursue a separate strategy that led to many unnecessary deaths. As a critic of the Swedish strategy, Olsen experienced hostility from the media and the Swedish Public Health Authority, and he reflects on the relationship between science, political power, and public policy debates.

During the Second World War, Chaim Perelman, a leader in the Jewish Belgian Resistance was writing a philosophical treatise on justice. Frustrated, he discovered that his training in analytic philosophy renedered him unable to make any arguments about why his cause was more just than that of the Nazis, because he had been trained to disregard arguments about values, preferences, or the probable. So Perelman began identifying everyday arguments humans use in newspapers and politics to discover how they work and what foundations they build upon, leading to his and Lucie Albrechts-Tyteca's masterpiece The New Rhetoric. Dr. Richard Enos joins us to discuss Perelman's theory of argumentation and how it provides a basis for making rational arguments and decisions about values. 

00:00 Defining demagoguery
04:00 Why Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt were not demagogues
10:30 Case Study: Earl Warren's demagogic argument about Japanese Internment
12:20 Threat perception and demagoguery/ "The Flight 93 Election"
14:40 Signs and evidence of threats
15:45 Demagoguery in the gay marriage debate
17:30 Demagoguery as "algae in a pond" allegory
18:30 How Trump out-competed other demagogues
21:20 Trump as a large Salomon Asch experiment on the nation
23:30 How dishonest media give demagogues the cover to flip
24:45 Rush Limbaugh and conservative talk radio as a case study in demagogue/demagogic culture
29:30 How media revolutions coincide with the rise of demagogues
30:45 The solution: we have to stop buying demagoguery
31:50 What inspired this book
33:00 Lesser and greater demagogues
34:10 In-group policing as a parry against demagogues (McCarthyism/Birchers)
36:10 The extremism of the current GOP base and the "ends justify any means" argument
37:20 The need for leadership and a reckoning to defeat demagoguery
39:30 Why "suspending democratic norms" is a one-way street
40:35 Rejecting "our" demagogues
42:15 Institutional remedies for demagoguery
43:20 Two-party systems and us/them rhetoric
44:45 How demagogues create us/them in multi-party systems
45:15 Gerrymandering, safe seats, and partisan extremism
46:05 What can WE do?
46:15 1. Make demagoguery less profitable/successful
46:52 2. Not argue with those who repeat demagoguery, but engage with them
49:18 3. Argue with those who repeat demagoguery, but stick to the issue at hand
50:25 4. Actively support democratic deliberation
51:00 Don't take your democratic freedoms for granted
52:19 Never-Trump Republicans and cross-party coalitions for democratic norms
56:00 Democracy is fragile and needs our commitment
56:45 Remembering the lessons of WWII and demagoguery
1:00:00 "Purifying" our public sphere is not a solution
1:00:50 Creating a culture "parry" for the thrust of demagoguery
1:01:48 How important should politics be in our lives?
1:03:20 Paul Woodruff's democratic values of "harmony" and "reverence"
1:04:30 Learning to get along